A few years ago, I got a call that my daughter fell off the monkey bars at daycare. She wasn’t able to use her wrist so we had it checked out and, sure enough, it was broken.

If you could x-ray my life behind closed doors, you’d see that there are plenty of days that I feel like that wrist - utterly broken and basically useless. My body feels broken, my brain feels broken, my spirit feels broken, my heart feels broken. I feel like a fractured version of myself, like I’m half a person now that some of my capabilities have been limited. It’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s that giant horse pill that gets stuck in your throat causing you to struggle to breathe until you can force it down. It’s an awful feeling and I know it well.

Just yesterday, I experienced a new symptom. Along with my normal vertigo and a mild pounding migraine, I got a shooting, stabbing pain that radiated from my neck to a spot behind my ear and then up into my head and over to my temple. It only lasted a few minutes but it was terrible. I’ll definitely be discussing this with my neurology team this week to get a better idea of why this is happening, but that doesn’t give me much comfort at the moment. The episode took me completely down for a few hours and the residual is still in effect. The fatigue hasn’t gone away as of yet, just the act of bathing my two youngest knocked me out for the remainder of the evening last night and no amount of coffee could get me over the hump of expending the energy to make breakfast this morning.

I cried to Brent out of pure frustration as I sat there defeated and destroyed all over again. I sobbed and asked him “How is THIS any way to live? There’s no quality of life in this constant mess of ups and downs!” When my attacks occur, they can sometimes take weeks to recover fully from if they’re bad enough. It’s during that time that I start to feel like a broken wife, a broken mom, a broken person.

You may not have Cerebral Vasospasms, Hemiplegic Migraines, Chronic Vertigo and Dystonic Neck Spasms to break your former stride, but I bet there’s something that sends shockwaves to the core of your being, too. Whatever that ‘thing’ is, I bet it makes you feel incomplete. It drags you down, it zaps your energy, it seizes your soul and it robs you of any scrap of joy. You’re not alone, I know how you feel. I also know that no one can survive in this state for long. You will waste away.

But what if I told you there’s a hope in these horrible circumstances, a calm in this chaos, a Savior in the storm? Our God is good. No matter how grim life gets, that fact remains. There’s a reason for the raincloud that seems to hover over our heads and the Lord is working it into something meaningful. When the rainbow emerges, we can stand in awe of its beauty. Until then, we can stand under the umbrella of Christ who understands our suffering perfectly and provides enough grace to get us through the downpour. I’ll stand under there with you.

Take heart, friends. The trials of this world cause real pain and they leave real scars. But there’s an interesting fact about broken things. When we went to get my daughter’s cast off, I asked about what precautions we should take. The doctor told me her wrist was actually STRONGER where the break had healed. Bones, among other things, become more fortified when the damage is repaired and these areas are tougher now than they would be had they never been broken in the first place.

We are in the healing process and God is doing the fortification. He’s strengthening us in areas where we will be given a unique ability to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose. Had my body never crashed, I would have never understood the world of chronic pain. Had I never experienced death, divorce, loneliness and betrayal, I would never have been able to know how heavy that emotional anchor can seam. But I do understand these things now, and I can wrap my arms around others in genuine unified heartache as I cry with them through their own devastations. I hate that they hurt but I love that I can help in some small way by being able to say that I’ve been there.

And my journey has lead me to writing these blog posts. They are therapeutic to me, certainly, but I hope they are helpful to you, too. So use your pain well. Feel stronger in your brokenness. All is not lost, in fact so much is gained simply by the fact that you have withstood experiences to guide you in your empathy toward others. You are a pillar of light. And even if your light only has the strength to shine dimly right now, it’s still a small shimmer of hope in the midst of someone else’s darkest hour.